Business applications of Artificial Intelligence: a framework to categorise AI use cases

A significant barrier to AI adoption in the business world is the scarcity of clear, accessible information on how to leverage AI to enhance organisational productivity. Understanding the practical applications of AI is a prerequisite for companies to identify relevant opportunities and develop a strategy to operationalise them. To address this need, the AI Governance and Regulatory Innovation team at The Alan Turing Institute is pursuing a research project to illuminate how businesses in the four BridgeAI priority sectors of agriculture, forestry and fishing, construction, creative industries, and transportation and storage can leverage AI to be more productive. The first milestone of this project is the publication of a framework for categorising and analysing business applications of AI and a brief analysis of sector-specific AI use cases. Our findings are published as a series of five documents: four sector-specific briefings complemented by this paper presenting a framework to categorise and analyse AI use cases. The sector-specific briefings can be accessed from here. The paper on the framework presents the tool that we developed to categorise and analyse AI use cases in a business context. In addition to providing the hermeneutical structure underpinning our research, this tool provides a valuable resource for businesses trying to identify relevant AI opportunities. Companies can use this framework as a starting point to build on and develop their bespoke methodology to identify, select, and implement the right AI solutions. The second milestone of this project will be to refine the framework based on feedback collected after the publication of this first exploratory version and expand its scope to include information about the risks connected to each AI use case and the mitigation strategies that can be adopted to address those risks in that specific context.